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MAKING A SPLASH: Samant’s
California-style wines are wooing young
Indians with fresh, fruity flavors and affordable
price tags.
Courtesy Sula Vineyards |
Curries, chutneys, lentils, rice:
these foods spring to mind at the thought of India.
But Indian wine seems an oxymoron, like Chinese lasagna
or German teriyaki.
Indians traditionally favor whiskey and beer, sipping
barely a teaspoon of wine per capita per year. A massive
market of 800 million potential wine drinkers has long
gone untapped.
That is beginning to change, however, in part through
the efforts of Rajeev Samant, a Stanford-trained engineer
who aims to become to India what Robert Mondavi, ’36,
was to California—a vintner, indeed, but also
a mentor and industry advocate. Samant’s whites,
rosés and now reds, produced not far from his
native Mumbai (Bombay), are making a splash among the
hip urban crowds of the subcontinent and drawing praise
in other countries as well. With each successive year,
sales have doubled, says Samant, ’89, MS ’90.
His Sula Vineyards, now preparing for its sixth vintage,
expects to sell more than 40,000 cases and to turn a
profit for the second season in a row.
“Sula Vineyards is proving that success can be
achieved against even the heftiest of odds.... [Samant]
has created some of India’s first truly international-class
wines,” said Wine Spectator two years
ago in its first-ever feature on an Indian winery.
Indians are becoming curious about wine as millions
of affluent young people return from working or studying
overseas, bringing Western tastes with them. “Wine
is the new buzzword of high society,” India’s
newsmagazine The Week reported last January
in a story titled “Gourmet’s Goblet.”
Samant has accelerated the trend by getting his wines
into fashionable restaurants and hotel bars, and has
helped mitigate the snob factor by pricing them at under
$15 a bottle. He has educated staff on how to serve
various wines, organized wine-oriented happy hours for
young professionals, and demystified it all on a website
(sulawines.com)
covering basics like “How do I open a bottle of
wine?”
Samant, who hardly knew a corkscrew from a church key
when he left Mumbai for the Farm, developed his appreciation
for wine while at Stanford. But the economics major
with a master’s in industrial engineering had
no plan to settle in the countryside of his homeland
and grow grapes. He followed the lure of Silicon Valley
in the early 1990s, landing a job as one of Oracle’s
youngest financial managers, then quickly became restless
and left to travel through Mexico and Thailand. In 1992,
Samant’s restlessness coincided with India’s
decision to ease trade barriers with the rest of the
world. “I was gripped by the excitement of those
changes and wanted to go back to my country to help
create job opportunities there,” he says.
One day in mid-1993, Samant’s father took him
on a tour of the family’s ancestral lands near
the town of Nasik, 120 miles northeast of Mumbai. The
elder Samant planned to sell the 30-acre property. “It
was so beautiful, with gently rolling hills, a large
lake and rich clay soil,” Samant recalls. “I
told him, ‘Wait—don’t sell it. I’d
like to do something there.’ ”
Over the next four years, Samant became something of
a gentleman farmer, cultivating first mangoes and Thompson
seedless grapes, long grown in the region for export.
Then the idea came to him: if table grapes would grow
there, why not grapes for fine wine?
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‘When the idea of producing
wine in India was first proposed to me, I thought,
“Huh?” ’
– Kerry Damskey |
Samant did some research and confirmed that the hot,
dry days and cold nights of fall and winter in Nasik
(altitude 2,000 feet) resembled the summer growing conditions
of California’s Sonoma Valley. He decided the
time and conditions were right to create not only a
vineyard but also a winery—something few Indians
had done before him.
But Samant knew nothing about the wine business. So
he flew back to Northern California, looking to team
up with an expert. Through a string of connections,
he was introduced to Kerry Damskey, a Sonoma-based consultant
who had overseen winery startups and designed wine-production
systems for 25 years. Damskey recalls his initial skepticism:
“When the idea of producing wine in India was
first proposed to me, I thought, ‘Huh?’”
He changed his mind, however, when he visited Nasik
and saw the potential of the region.
Damskey and Samant decided to produce India’s
first homegrown sauvignon blancs and chenin blancs—fresh,
fruity and slightly spicy whites that would complement
Indian food—and to cultivate the grapes from October
through January. Summer is the grape-growing season
in most parts of the world, “but our summer is
monsoon season,” explains Samant. “In the
late fall and winter, the climate becomes quite Mediterranean.
We knew this would yield grapes that would produce the
flavor of wine typical of Northern California, rather
than the more tropical-fruit flavors that you would
expect from an area like ours.”
Samant hired one of Mumbai’s premier architects
to build the winery on the premises. The result, according
to the Wine Spectator, is “a showcase
facility that can hold its own aesthetically and viticulturally
with those of California.” And he was determined
to produce a world-class product, whether or not the
Indian palate was ready to discern the difference. “Raj
knew that for the company to really make a name for
itself [in India], its wines had to be accepted internationally,”
says Damskey. “It was a wise strategy.”
Today, Sula can barely keep up with the demand for
its three main wines: the sauvignon blanc (“floral,
crisp and dry with a hint of green peppers and a touch
of spice at the finish,” according to indianwine.com),
chenin blanc (“light, fresh and fruity”)
and champagne-style brut (“a creamy yet light
nectar that goes down like a dream”). More recently,
it has developed a white zinfandel and a cabernet sauvignon.
Overall, India’s wine consumption is still minuscule
at about 400,000 cases annually (roughly the output
of a medium-sized California winery), but analysts report
a strong growth rate of about 25 percent a year. And
although drinking wine with meals has not yet caught
on among India’s middle class, it has become de
rigueur among the urban rich. Most fancy restaurants
in India now carry Sula wines. “Even if we reached
only the most wealthy 1 percent of the Indian population,
that would still be 10 million people,” observes
Samant, who has been busy promoting winery tours and
tastings in India and beyond. The day after his interview
with STANFORD, he was set
to fly to Paris for a tasting of Sula wines at Lavinia,
the city’s premier wine store, which now carries
the label.
Indeed, the fledgling winemaker has formed a wine board
to encourage other Indians to make quality wine and
display their prowess to the rest of the world. “Raj
has taken a mentoring position in India,” says
Damskey, “much as Robert Mondavi did in the California
wine industry.” Explains Samant, “We’re
going to need a group of good producers if India is
going to be a contender in the world market. We have
to do it together.”
Samant has done more than create a pioneering winery;
he has helped to cultivate a new industry in his country.
There were only perhaps three wineries in India before
he got started, none of which made locally grown New
World wines. Now there are at least 10, and Samant thinks
30 or more will spring up in the next two years. “We’ve
shown the way,” he says.
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